
Simon has clearly had to deal with these people before... and I applaud this course of action!
Beer is on me, Simon!
213 publicly visible posts • joined 16 May 2016
The Plan
In the beginning, there was a plan,
And then came the assumptions,
And the assumptions were without form,
And the plan without substance,
And the darkness was upon the face of the workers,
And they spoke among themselves saying,
"It is a crock of shit and it stinks."
And the workers went unto their Supervisors and said,
"It is a pile of dung, and we cannot live with the smell."
And the Supervisors went unto their Managers saying,
"It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong,
Such that none may abide by it."
And the Managers went unto their Directors saying,
"It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide by its strength."
And the Directors spoke among themselves saying to one another,
"It contains that which aids plants growth, and it is very strong."
And the Directors went to the Vice Presidents saying unto them,
"It promotes growth, and it is very powerful."
And the Vice Presidents went to the President, saying unto him,
"This new plan will actively promote the growth and vigour
Of the company With very powerful effects."
And the President looked upon the Plan
And saw that it was good,
And the Plan became Policy.
And this, my friend, is how shit happens.
At my last job, we had a room with all the HVAC ducting in it, and as such everyone was required to wear hard hats when in it. The problem was that the ducting was 6'3" off the floor, and being 6' I could walk under it safely, until I put a hard hat on, after which I was continually banging the hat on the ducting.
Sadly logic doesn't factor in these rules, and as the tallest person in my team (only my manager was taller than me) I tried to get other people to go into that room instead...
Once had a similar thing with a laptop whose keyboard had not been installed correctly, and the delete key was in the top right corner. Every time the lid was closed with the device running, and Outlook open, all of the user's emails vanished...
After several people had looked at it, and recovered all the messages, they finally brought it to me, and after discounting the hackers or the malware, I just pushed the keyboard into place and voila, problem solved.
We had a complete technophobe of a marketing director, back in around 2002, who never used his computer. He'd always come to us to dictate emails (despite none of us being secretaries), and when we asked him why, he complained that his computer was really old and slow. And to be fair, it was the last 486 in the building, so we ordered him a shiny new Pentium 3.
When it arrived, I took out his old computer, and he took the opportunity to rearrange his office a bit. Meaning that the new computer was now too far from the network port, and I needed to get a new cable. We didn't have any of the right length in stock, so I ordered some new ones, and told him that I'd be back to install the cable in the next couple of days.
Things happened, there was a weekend, and it was 6 weeks before he came back to me to say that his new computer didn't work... SIX WEEKS!
I genuinely don't mind being in the office, it's just the complete waste of time and effort of sitting in traffic for an hour before and after work that bothers me.
When I WFH, I don't have to get up until 8:45, and when I finish at 6, I am already at home, and ready to cook a proper dinner. At lunchtime I can get on my exercise bike and knock out a quick 10km, have a shower and a sandwich and get back to work within the hour.
I can't do any of that in the office, and I can't not take the lunch hour to leave early, so I sit and read a book, as it's a lot safer than wandering the mean streets of Uxbridge.
We had a user who complained that her local printer (on the desk opposite hers) was too far away, and she'd hurt her back stretching to get printouts from it. So Health and Safety asked me to have a look at it (knowing that I was a curmudgeon)... I duly went to the office, inspected the printer and the layout of the office, and noting that there was a huge networked MFD in the same room, I removed the local printer so that she would have to stand up and walk to the other one, thus preventing her injuring herself further.
Yep, I used it when I was at a site migrating PCs from the old company domain to our one (having purchased their company) and realised after the first reboot that I'd forgotten to change the local admin account password, and therefore couldn't log on to join to the new domain...
My "office hours" have not changed while I've been working from home. My work laptop lives in my spare bedroom/office, and does not come out of there unless I'm going to the physical office building.
I do not go into that room before 9am, or after 6pm. Those are my contracted hours, I do not get paid overtime, thus no overtime happens.
to a colleague who had been to watch Man Utd lose the Champions League final to Barcelona.
I got approval from our manager first, and he was just as big a joker as me, so happily went for it.
He eventually asked me how to get rid of it after seeing the grinning Barcelona team as his wallpaper for two weeks.
I arrived at work one morning to be greeted with the news that "someone tried to install Java on one of the MFD printers, and it didn't work".
As I was pre-coffee myself, it took me a while to work out what they meant. When I got upstairs, I found that someone had put a pint of freshly brewed coffee on the sorter unit of the MFD (cost ~£20,000), and proceeded to print out their days instruction booklets. Whereupon the sorted had duly started moving up and and down rapidly, and spilled the pint of coffee into the printer.
Fortunately this user was only a partial idiot, and had turned the printer off to prevent anything too bad from happening... so I separated all the parts I could, and we dried as much as we could with paper towels, and then I raised a ticket with our printe management company. Who turned up a couple of hours later, and miraculously, nothing had gotten inside it.
It did smell nice for a couple of weeks though!
When wireless mice first came out. Except they only had two channels, so if more than two people were using them, everyone's equipment quickly becamse useless.
And for a joke, when you were bored, you'd just change the channel on your mouse and move it around a lot and wait for the cries of surprise and annoyance from your colleagues.
Even better were the keyboards. Change the channel, and type something like "This is IT, your account has been suspended for watching too much porn"
We had a complete technophobe of a marketing director, back in around 2002, who never used his computer. He'd always come to us to dictate emails (despite none of us being secretaries), and when we asked him why, he complained that his computer was really old and slow. And to be fair, it was the last 486 in the building, so we ordered him a shiny new Pentium 3.
When it arrived, I took out his old computer, and he took the opportunity to rearrange his office a bit. Meaning that the new computer was now too far from the network port, and I needed to get a new cable. We didn't have any of the right length in stock, so I ordered some new ones, and told him that I'd be back to install the cable in the next couple of days.
Things happened, there was a weekend, and it was 6 weeks before he came back to me to say that his new computer didn't work... SIX WEEKS!
The company I worked for acquired another smaller company, and after a few months closed them down, making everyone redundant.
When we turned up at the site to start collecting all the equipment up, one of the senior senior managers noticed a flashing light on a label printer, and asked someone what it meant. "Probably a paused print job", came the reply. So he pressed the button next to it, releasing a job of 5,000 labels saying "<company name> are c@nts!"
Highly amusing for everyone except the manager...
I was in my office one day circa 2001, and "someone" came in and put a Zip disk (remember them?) into the drive of a computer used by someone who wasn't in that day. Then went back to their own desk.
Then I noticed the activity light flashing a lot, and being a nosy bugger (and not trusting this person a jot), I opened Windows Explorer and went to the Zip drive, and found that the disk was filling up with images of women who had clearly gotten too warm, and decided to remove all their clothing.
Screenshots were duly taken (of filenames, not the images), and information sent to HR & Management, whereupon the user in question claimed that he was "copying it for a friend who didn't have internet access). Management then decided that even though there was a precedent of sacking people caught doing this kind of thing, that he merely merited a warning.
It's partly due to naff content, partly that I've seen pretty much everything I want to watch from them over the last two years, and partly that although I have access to Netflix, Amazon Prime, Sky Movies and Disney Plus, there are still things that I can't get.
I'm not going to get any more subscriptions, especially when things disappear from them and someone else gets to decide what I can and can't watch. Everyone has suddenly decided that they need their own streaming service, and you can only view their content on that. I've had enough of them all, I want one service with access to all of them, so I can pick and choose the few shows/films I want to see, and not pay for all the rest of the dross that I will never watch.
Also, while I'm on a rant, how do Sky get away with charging you for access to channels, and then forcing you to watch adverts. If I'm paying for a service, I expect to get it without adverts. And if you insist on having adverts, then why am I paying for it?
I've had that with a Powerline network. Was using it for a few months until one day everything seemed really slow, and I couldn't see my media server. so I went to the router, and found it was for Sky broadband, which surprised me as I was with BT at the time...